For some time drums formed of plastic materials have been used to store and ship liquids and other fluid materials. A drawback of using either an all plastic container or a composite container with a plastic liner is the difficulty of preserving the integrity of the closure arrangement. For example, polyethylene drums used in the petroleum industry are often damaged in the area of the bung threads when steel tubes are inserted in the normal course of filling or dispensing. These drums may not be salvageable when attempts are made to refurbish or recondition them. This is inefficient and extremely costly.
Although efforts have been made to incorporate replaceable necks or closure arrangements in an effort to address this problem, no satisfactory method has been developed to enable the easy and safe removal of the replaceable necks. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,573,605, (Udell, Mar. 4, 1986) employs a locking tab arrangement to secure a neck to a drum bung. This arrangement necessitates detaching a lock tab from an adaptor flange in order to remove the neck from the bung. This method of removal requires a cutting tool that can be unsafe.